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Tom Friedman: Special-Needs Pundit

2009-12-07T13:25:00-05:00

Earlier today, I noted some moronic statements from Tom Friedman (and Bob Woodward) on Meet The Press this Sunday. Jesse Walker sends me this tidbit from The World is Flat author, this time yapping on CNN with Fareed Zakaria:

We're talking about Afghanistan. And we're talking about America in the middle of the great recession. I feel like we're like an unemployed couple who just went out and decided to adopt a special needs baby. You know, I mean, that's really kind of what we're doing. And that's like, whoa, y'know, that terrifies me.

More here, via TPM. Video below:

Just remember, kids: People in very powerful positions are often really, really stupid.

Last Week's Top 5 Hit & Run Posts

2009-12-07T13:00:00-05:00

Here's what you were reading last week at Hit & Run:

Climategate and Scientific Journal Chicanery, by Ronald Bailey (11/30)

Climategate and Ideology, by Ronald Bailey (12/4)

The Drama Builds in Marikafka County, by Radley Balko (12/1)

Larry Summers: His Genius Can't Be Measured in Dollars, by Tim Cavanaugh (11/30)

The Continuing Drama of the Document-Swiping Deputy, by Radley Balko (12/3)

Why Peter Jennings Hated John Stossel; How to Get Tix For Stossel's New Show

2009-12-07T12:10:00-05:00

This is the first week for John Stossel's new Fox Business Channel show, which is called...Stossel and is slotted to air on Thursdays at 8p.m. I'm proud to be among the first guests and look below for info on how to get tickets for the program's audience.

But first, some great moments from a Daily Beast interview with "the mustachioed Stossel" whom ABC said in its press release announcing his move to FBC "has engaged and occasionally enraged our audience with thought-provoking questions and analysis."

He enraged not only the audience over the years, but also many at the network—notably the late Peter Jennings, who believed Stossel’s brand of libertarian advocacy journalism was a blot on the ABC escutcheon. Jennings refused even to look at him when they passed in the halls. “Peter felt he was upholding the objectivity of ABC and I was violating that, I was bad for ABC,” Stossel tells The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview....

The first [show's main topic] will be...Atlas Shrugged...because I think 50 years ago, Ayn Rand predicted today....Big government, nice-sounding legislation like “The Preservation of Livelihood Law,” which mandated that Hank Rearden’s production must not be bigger than any other steel mill, to make it a level playing field. It’s silly....it’s what Wesley Mouch, the evil bureaucrat in the book, passed. And what Tim Geithner and what Barney Frank might like to pass....

People acting in their own self-interest is the fuel for all the discovery, innovation, and prosperity that powers the world....Gordon Gekko describes a world the way a socialist bureaucrat sees it: Wealth is a static pie and rich people grab the biggest share. But that’s a child’s view of the way the world works. I make speeches arguing the opposite. Wealth is created. When entrepreneurs are free to compete, they grow the pie so that everyone’s share gets larger....

Drugs, prostitution, steroids for athletes [should all be legal]. If Major League Baseball wants to have a no-steroid rule, fine. But it’s none of Congress’ business. If we want to have a National Steroid League football games, and they're consenting adults, that’s fine. I’m happy if states legislate different limits, 18, 16, 21, different things, but certainly by 21, we should own our own bodies.

Read the whole thing here.

If you want to be part of the studio audience for that show or other tapings, you can email Stosseltix@foxnews.com or call 877-369-8587.

The current taping schedule and topics:

When: Tuesday, December 8th
Topic: Atlas Shrugged and Its Meaning Today
Where: Fox Studios, 133 West 47th Street
Time: 1:00 p.m.

When: Thursday, December 10th
Topic: Global Warming and the Environment
Time: 10:00 a.m.

When: Thursday, December 17th
Topic: Health Care
Time: 10:00 a.m.

New at Reason: Shikha Dalmia on What India Shouldn’t Do at Copenhagen

2009-12-07T12:00:00-05:00

In the long run, writes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia, India will gain more international respect if it remains focused on growing its economy rather than hopping on the global-warming bandwagon at the Copenhagen climate-change summit next week.

What India Shouldn't Do at Copenhagen

2009-12-07T12:00:00-05:00

In the pre-iTunes, pre-MTV age, there was usually a multiyear lag before hit songs in the West reached India. Now India is experiencing a similar time-lag on global warming. Just when fresh doubts about the issue are emerging in the West, India is flirting with the idea of hopping on the global-warming bandwagon at the Copenhagen climate-change summit next week.

This is in large part a misguided attempt to bolster India's political standing in the world. In an October letter to the prime minister conveniently leaked to the press, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh expressed concern that India's intransigence on the issue was making it a pariah among developed countries, jeopardizing its bid for permanent membership at the United Nations Security Council. He counseled that India delink itself from the Group of 77 developing nations resisting forced emission cuts without compensation, and instead make common cause with the Group of 20 rich countries pushing for climate action.

Ramesh's letter is a significant change of tune, given he made headlines this summer when he bluntly told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that India was simply in no position to accept binding emissions cuts. It is widely regarded as a trial balloon by the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and has triggered a maelstrom of protest in parliament, forcing Ramesh to pledge not to accept legally binding emissions cuts. But the government is nevertheless trying to change India's current domestic global-warming policy more dramatically than it is letting on to better align it with global demands.

The current policy, called Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions, in some ways is a declaration of India's independence on climate change. It essentially tells the world that India will undertake mitigation efforts if and when it is in its self-interest. The proposed new policy, dubbed Nationally Accountable Mitigation Outcomes, is something completely different. It would commit India to developing a mitigation plan right away. The plan would be enforced by domestic law but Ramesh—tellingly—wants to submit the emissions reports generated for international scrutiny every two years. This could well become a prelude to India eventually joining a global emissions regime.

Even worse, the new regime would unleash Byzantine new regulations on the country, from new energy efficiency standards in building codes to new fuel economy standards for vehicles. India would have to obtain 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources—wind, solar and small hydroelectric power—compared to 8 percent now. Given that these sources are typically far more expensive than fossil fuels, this would mean putting Indians, 40 percent of whom don't even have access to electricity, on an even stricter energy diet. The increased expense will put homes, air conditioning, and cars out of reach of more Indians—all of which will make them, especially the poor, less able to withstand floods, heat waves and other dire effects of global warming should they ever materialize.

The resulting emission cuts won't even make a dent in global temperatures. India's per capita energy consumption is 15 times less than America's and half of China's—the two biggest polluters. To be sure, President Obama is poised to pledge to cut U.S. carbon emissions 80 percent below 2005 by 2050 at Copenhagen. But it's an empty promise because there is little to zero chance that he will be able to get Congress to go along. China too announced plans—modest by all accounts—to curb its emissions. So India will certainly face pressure at the conference to act, despite the fact that bigger polluters won't.

But as a developing country, India can least afford to give up its right to consume as much energy as is necessary to deliver all Indians a living standard comparable to the one that rich countries take for granted. There is every reason to believe that the new License Raj will damage India's economy every bit as much as the old one in the preliberalization days, when India's growth rate remained stuck at around 2 percent. This would be unfortunate at any time, but especially now, when the West itself is in the middle of a huge rethinking on this issue.

Front and center is the ClimateGate scandal that's erupting in Britain. Leaked emails out of the climate research center of Britain's University of East Anglia, unveiled last week, suggest scientists manipulated data, destroyed inconvenient evidence, and tried to suppress opposing views. The scandal is prompting calls for a full-blown government inquiry into the science of global warming in both Britain and America. Cap-and-trade regimes in Washington and Canberra have stalled, and no one expects a climate deal of any substance at next week's Copenhagen meeting.

Meanwhile, global-warming fatigue is setting in everywhere. An October poll by Pew Center Research found that only 57 percent of Americans think there is solid evidence that the earth is getting warmer, down from 71 percent in April 2008. Only 36 percent now believe that the warming is caused by humans, compared to 47 percent in April 2008. Nor is America unique. The number of people rating climate change as the major issue they worry about has dropped to fourth place behind global economic stability in the last year, according to the HSBC Climate Confidence Monitor, a polling operation established by the bank and leading environmental outfits.

In the long run, India will gain more international respect if it remains focused on growing its economy instead of reshackling its people under a new, green License Raj. That's the real climate-change calculation Singh should be worrying about.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a Forbes columnist. This column originally appeared appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

If It's Sunday, It's Moronic Statements by Tom Friedman on Meet The Press; Plus, Winning Afghan Hearts & Minds Via Shared Toilets

2009-12-07T11:31:00-05:00

From Meet The Press yesterday, during a jabber session featuring Hot, Flat, and Stupid author Thomas Friedman and mindreader cum human tape recorder Bob Woodward:

[David Gregory:] ...this week the war on Afghanistan, the war on unemployment came together. Well, ultimately, what's more consequential for the this presidency?

MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, I'll tell you how you bring them together into one policy, David.

MR. GREGORY: Yeah.

MR. FRIEDMAN: It's called a gasoline tax of a dollar a gallon, OK? That you raise the money that we need to pay down the deficit, to pay for health care, and at the same time take away the very funding that's going to these people indirectly to draw a bull's-eye on our back. And the fact that our politics can't allow us to do the very thing we know is critical and important, shame on us.

Shame on us? Not so much. Shame on The New York Times for running Friedman, who recently claimed China is better governed than the U.S., for so long? Sure, I can get behind that. Exactly how taxing gas more in the U.S. is part of a war on unemployment is beyond me. And to be honest, it's not exactly clear that whoever we're fighting in Afghanistan now is getting rich off oil money from the Arab world. Opium poppies, maybe. I doubt that the last stand at Kandahar is going to be brought to you by the good folks at Chevron buying Saudi oil on the world market.

But how to best win the hearts and minds of those Afghans who don't hate us because we're beautiful, rich, decadent, or whatever? Bob Woodward has answers dammit. Unfortunately, most of the revolve around suggesting that Afghans are primitive cavemen who eat and shit in the same pot:

[Bob Woordward:] I think the lives of the average Afghan come into play here. How are they living? What's going on with them? And we are sending our military to protect them. You know what, I mean, that—this isn't an abstraction, it is about our military forces going in, eating goat with them...

MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

MR. WOODWARD: ...smoking bad cigarettes, using the same toilet. And for them it's not a toilet, it's, it's a pot.

Mm-hmm, indeed!

Whole transcript, including Secretary of State Clinton and Defense Gates walking back withdrawal dates, here.

Last Week's Top 5 Hits at Reason.com

2009-12-07T11:30:00-05:00

Check out last week's most read Reason.com columns:

The Scientific Tragedy of Climategate: Can climate change science recover from the damage done by leaked emails? by Ronald Bailey (12/1)

Killing Slaughterhouse: Understanding the controversial 1873 decision at the center of the Supreme Court's upcoming gun rights fight, by Brian Doherty (12/2)

We-Don't-Want-To-Talk-About-It-Gate: Why won't more politicians talk about Climategate? by David Harsanyi (12/5)

A Reason To Be Skeptical: The lessons of Climategate, by David Harsanyi (12/2)

A New Alliance for Criminal Justice Reform? Don't Count On It: Why talk of a left-right alliance to fight the prosecution state seems unlikely, by Radley Balko (11/30)

The Election Made Me Do it

2009-12-07T10:58:00-05:00

Not at all to pick on self-made political commentator, web entrepreneur, and alleged global warming flip-flopper Charles Johnson, but a recent interview he gave explaining his dramatic I-break-with-thee letter to the Right contained as neat an explanation I've seen for why you shouldn't trust any partisans in the heat of an election:

I know you voted for John McCain, and after the election, I think either your first or second post you noted that the Muslim Brotherhood was pleased.

Well that was true.

There's not a part of you that cringes when you hear that post?

No, I think it's important for people to know these things. Because it's true that the Muslim Brotherhood was pleased when Obama was elected. But I don't think they're quite as pleased now. He's pretty much kept a lot of the foreign policies of the Bush administration intact.

How do you think Obama's doing so far?

I've actually changed my mind quite a bit about Barack Obama. You know how things are during an election, everybody gets hyper-partisan, and I guess I was guilty of that as much as anyone. But I've seen him be a lot more centrist than I ever expected during the election, based on his background, and the people that he got his political start with, you know, Bill Ayeres [sic], Reverend Wright. If I had to go back, knowing what I do now, I probably would have voted for him.

Wow.

Also, I've become extremely negative toward Sarah Palin.

Didn't you feel that way in the beginning?

I was skeptical of her, but I was ready to defend her, because it was hyper-partisan time.

Link via L.A. Observed.

What Does the Congressional Budget Office Say About Health Care Reform?

2009-12-07T10:51:00-05:00

In a column on health care today, E.J. Dionne argues that the Congressional Budget Office has cleared the way for reform:

The core issues of this debate have been settled. The Congressional Budget Office has swept away the major arguments that opponents of reform have been trying to make. The bill before the Senate would cut the deficit, not increase it, and would stabilize or reduce health care premiums for most people, not raise them. The proposal contains serious cost-control measures that can be built on over time. Passing health care reform is thus not only morally necessary, but also fiscally responsible.

These are certainly the numbers that have gotten the most play in the press. But looking a little closer, I'm not sure CBO confirms any of this.

On deficit neutrality, the CBO has warned strongly on repeated occasions that there's a long history of Medicare reimbursement cuts not coming to pass, and that the bill's score would change substantially if that were to happen once again (which many believe is likely). The CBO has also explicitly stated that if you include the legislative fix to the last round of failed reimbursement cuts—as House Democrats did in their original bill—the total effect on the deficit is decidedly not neutral.

And while it's true that the CBO expects premiums for those who receive insurance through their employers to stay roughly flat, the CBO also expects premiums in the individual market—the market that this bill was primarily intended to reform—to jump significantly. Any premium reductions in that market would come through taxpayer-funded subsidies, not through reform's magical shrinking effect on premiums.

Moreover, the CBO simply hasn't said that the bill's cost-control measures are likely to pay off. If anything, it's said the opposite. Over the summer, CBO chief Doug Elmendorf said he believed the reform bills he was seeing at the time would bend the cost curve in the wrong direction. Since then, the CBO has taken the official position that it can't evaluate one way or another. But given that 1) the major components of the bills are largely the same now as they were this summer and 2) Medicare's actuary has stated that reform is likely to increase costs, I think it's more than reasonable to be skeptical of any claims that the bill will reduce medical spending.

Teddy Roosevelt and the Road to Pearl Harbor

2009-12-07T10:35:00-05:00

Historian James Bradley had a fascinating op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times tracing the origins of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor back to the foreign policy of President Theodore Roosevelt, who famously intervened in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and earned himself a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Yet as Bradley notes, Roosevelt was secretly acting on Japan’s behalf, or as he wrote to his son, “not merely with her approval but with her expressed desire.” Following that, Roosevelt actively encouraged Japan to emulate America’s recent imperial expansion, though the results would prove disastrous in the long-term:

In a secret presidential cable to Tokyo, in July 1905, Roosevelt approved the Japanese annexation of Korea and agreed to an “understanding or alliance” among Japan, the United States and Britain “as if the United States were under treaty obligations.” The “as if” was key: Congress was much less interested in North Asia than Roosevelt was, so he came to his agreement with Japan in secret, an unconstitutional act.

To signal his commitment to Tokyo, Roosevelt cut off relations with Korea, turned the American legation in Seoul over to the Japanese military and deleted the word “Korea” from the State Department’s Record of Foreign Relations and placed it under the heading of “Japan.”

Roosevelt had assumed that the Japanese would stop at Korea and leave the rest of North Asia to the Americans and the British. But such a wish clashed with his notion that the Japanese should base their foreign policy on the American model of expansion across North America and, with the taking of Hawaii and the Philippines, into the Pacific. It did not take long for the Japanese to tire of the territorial restrictions placed upon them by their Anglo-American partners.

It’s also worth remembering that before he became president, Roosevelt was one of the central figures in the Spanish-American War, which resulted in the U.S. acquiring Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam and then waging a long, bloody, and undeclared war of occupation in the Philippines. Before he led his famous Rough Riders into battle in Cuba (a war that he relentlessly cheered on), Roosevelt was serving as assistant secretary of the Navy. From that position, he unilaterally ordered U.S. Admiral George Dewey to set sail for the Philippines, where the Spanish fleet was then anchored. At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Dewey won an overwhelming victory at Manilla Bay, thanks in part to the cooperation of the Filipino rebels who were busy fighting Spanish imperialism. But rather than granting the Philippines the limited degree of liberty and self-government that was bestowed on Cuba, the U.S. went on to wage a war of occupation that lasted until the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and left tens of thousands of Filipinos and some 4,000 Americans dead.

The fighting started after a minor and otherwise totally forgettable skirmish between closely situated U.S. and Filipino troops. Yet for President William McKinley and the imperialist hawks circling him, it served as the perfect opportunity for the U.S. to attempt to seize control. As the great libertarian lawyer and Anti-Imperialist League leader Moorfield Storey wrote in his 1926 book, The Conquest of the Philippines by the United States, McKinley “sanctioned a war without the authority of Congress, he refused to parley, and he told Congress that the question would not be open until the Conquest by arms had been completed. What wearer of a ‘kingly crown’ could more despotically have dealt with a question of such vital importance to the nation?”

Thus the U.S. came to control the Philippines, where we’d fight Japan—who were following Teddy Roosevelt’s imperialistic example and trying to push us out—during World War II.

NPR: Public's Absolute Lack of Interest in Totalist Responses to Global Warming is Proof We Are Scared Shitless of It.

2009-12-07T10:12:00-05:00

NPR ran a piece today about the apparent paradox that as "scientists" become more convinced that climate change is real, man-made, and catastrophic, the global public is shrugging its shoulders.

In a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, climate comes in dead last, No. 20 of the 20 big issues of concern to America.

As former Sen. Tim Wirth, who calls for massive, transformative responses to global warming, puts it:

"I don't think any place in the world would you find the public demanding [climate legislation]. I think it's very hard to see the public demand anything. That's very rare."

NPR puzzled over the lack of concern from you, me, and the Chinese factory worker. What might explain the lack of a sense of urgency? Well, ClimateGate ain't helping. And then there's all that money from Big Carbon, which is reinforcing doubts that warming is either occuring as rapidly as doomsayers claim and underscores the economic consequences of say, reducing carbon emissions per capita back to what they were in 1875.

As a talking head put it during the segment, "It's the economy, stupid": Because of the crap economy, goes this line of thinking, economic concerns are paramount. Eh, mebbe. But that doesn't explain why expert opinion ranks the combating of global warming equally low on the totem pole of holier-than-thou causes. Hence, the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus, a group of eight economists organized by "skeptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg, prioritized 30 ways to improve life on Earth for the poor via cost-benefit analysis of all sorts of activities. Fighting man-made global warming came in 30th out of 30 after the analysts found "that spending $800 billion until 2100 would yield just $685 billion in climate change benefits."

Needless to say, NPR didn't talk to anyone from the Copenhagen Consensus. Instead, they offered a really fascinating way to explain the lack of mass interest in reducing global warming. The reason, the story suggests, is that we just can't handle the truth:

[Whitman College's Kari Marie] Norgaard studied this shift in public opinion and found that as people start to feel overwhelmed by the scope of the problem, they simply turn away from the topic. It's a form of denial, she says.

"We just don't want to know about it, so we are actively distancing ourselves from it or trying to protect ourselves from it."

That implies that some of the swing in public opinion can actually be explained as a reaction to growing public awareness of the issue, like Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, or the 2007 United Nations science report.

Whole NPR segment in text and audio here.

Let me suggest a counter-narrative: Americans are rightly skeptical not of climate change per se, but of obviously politicized areas of science. We thankfully do not live in a world of lab-coat-wearing experts who dictate the Truth to us anymore. Any number of bogus scientific discoveries has cured us of such faith and so has decades of politicians lying to us about everything from the Gulf of Tonkin incident to the meaning of the word is to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to the pressing need for the feds to run GM. This sort of doubt has added support to what Ron Bailey has called "policy nihilism," a very rational belief that policies designed to mitigate climate change will be far, far worse than simply dealing with changed climates. As Bailey puts it

The transaction costs associated with addressing man-made global warming may turn out to be prohibitively high. In other words, the benefits achieved from trying to mitigate global warming will be swamped by the costs of distributing the corporate welfare used to buy the political acquiescence of various industries. You might hope to implement good public policy to deal with a problem, but if good public policy is impossible, policy nihilism is the more rational response.

Think about it, NPR listeners (or, better yet, NPR editors and journos): Climate-change activists aver that the very fate of the planet is at stake. And they call for a hurry-up offense on a set of plans that will by their own admission restructure every aspect of life on the Big Blue Marble. We don't have all the answers but the time for action is now! Think of TARP. Think of the Patriot Act. Has there ever been a time outside of a used-car lot where those sorts of high-pressure tactics are taken seriously? I don't think so. That the public is slow to action may just be a sign that it knows what it's doing, not that it's scared shitless by Al Gore's inconvenient exaggerations.

Global Temperature Trend Update -- December 7, 2009

2009-12-07T08:57:00-05:00

Just as they do every month and just in time for the opening of the United Nations' Copenhagen climate change conference, University of Alabama at Huntsville climatologists John Christy and Roy Spencer are reporting the latest global temperature trends from satellite data. Below are the newest data updated through November, 2009.

Latest Global Temperatures

Spencer notes:

The global-average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly rebounded from +0.29 deg. C in October to +0.50 deg. C in November (emphasis his.) Both hemispheres, as well as the tropics, contributed to this warmth. The global anomaly for November of +0.50 deg. C is a period record for November (since 1979); the previous November high was +0.40 deg C. in 2005.

Go here for the data on which the above chart is based. The global average temperature is increasing at +0.13 degrees Celsius per decade. The northern hemisphere is warming at +0.19 degrees per decade and the southern hemisphere is warming at +0.06 degrees per decade. Interestingly, the satellites show that the north polar region is warming at +0.43 degrees per decade and the south polar region is cooling at -0.06 degrees per decade.

Matt Welch Debates The Nation's Christopher Hayes on Afghanistan, Public Opinion on Climate Change, "Green Jobs," and China

2009-12-07T08:17:00-05:00

Watch below, or follow the link, which divvies up the hour-long chat into digestible segments and offers a lively comments section.

The President's War on Christmas

2009-12-07T08:06:00-05:00

Will of The League of Ordinary Gentleman nominates this as the best conspiracy theory ever, and he may well be right. From the Memphis Commerical Appeal:

In the opinion of Arlington [Tennessee] Mayor Russell Wiseman, President Barack Obama's speech on Tuesday night on the war in Afghanistan was deliberately timed to block the Christian message of the "Peanuts" television Christmas special.

Wiseman made the statements on his Facebook page, where he declared Obama to be a Muslim.

The report also notes that A Charlie Brown Christmas "has become an endearing program for many because of its emphasis on the 'real meaning of Christmas.'" In Mayor Wiseman's honor, I'll reach into the archives and pull out my reminder that the Peanuts special takes on a different tone when you pair it with its follow-up:

Ten months after A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired, [Linus] returned to America's TV screens in It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, a special that undermines its predecessor more thoroughly than any sequel this side of the Alexandria Quartet. Where the first film is a testament to religious faith, the second is all about doubt, as Linus waits patiently for a supernatural being that everyone in the audience knows will never come. While his pals happily celebrate a proudly pagan holiday, Linus haplessly attempts to preach the true meaning of Halloween. Only one friend is briefly convinced, and even she is essentially motivated by lust and greed.

For a moment, despite everything, the Great Pumpkin seems to appear. It turns out to be the neighborhood beagle, himself suffering from the delusion that he's a World War I flying ace. Ho ho ho.

Remembering WW2 Vets on Pearl Harbor Day

2009-12-07T07:43:00-05:00

A month ago for Veteran's Day, Reason.tv's Dan Hayes released a moving memorial to World War II vets titled "Every Day is a Bonus." It's worth another look on Pearl Harbor Day:

Reason Morning Links: Sex! Crime! Bin Laden! Obama! The OMB! Sex Again!

2009-12-07T07:32:00-05:00

• One way to become a U.S. attorney: sleep with Max Baucus.

• The Supreme Court examines a vague corruption statute.

• Defense secretary declares: We haven't had good intelligence on Osama bin Laden's location in years.

• The Obama administration holds a closed-door meeting on open government.

• The Office of Management and Budget paves the way for amped-up Pentagon spending.

• Prostitutes offer free sex at the climate summit.

Iranian Student Protests

2009-12-07T07:17:00-05:00

Security forces and pro-government militiamen clashed with protesters shouting "death to the dictator" outside Tehran University on Monday, beating men and women with batons and firing tear gas, on a day of nationwide student demonstrations, witnesses said.

Thousands of protesters demonstrated in the streets outside the campus in support of students inside. As they chanted "death to the dictator," riot police and Basij militiamen charged the crowds, the witnesses said.

The plainclothes Basijis beat protesters on the heads and shoulders as the crowd scattered, then regrouped on nearby street corners. Nearby, protesters and Basijis pelted each other with stones, the witnesses said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

New at Reason: Steve Chapman on Health Care

2009-12-07T07:00:00-05:00

One of the ostensible reasons for reforming our health insurance system is the need to halt the growth of spending on medical treatment. But as Steve Chapman writes, it may be a surprise to learn that in its first major vote on the health care overhaul, the U.S. Senate took a clear and simple position: Cost is no object.

Boobs in Congress

2009-12-07T07:00:00-05:00

One of the ostensible reasons for reforming our health insurance system is the need to halt the growth of spending on medical treatment. So it may be a surprise to learn that in its first major vote on the health care overhaul, the U.S. Senate took a clear and simple position: Cost is no object.

In November, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, a federally sponsored panel of medical experts, announced that it was recommending against routine mammography among women younger than 50. The proposal, coming amid the health care debate, was taken as a gruesome attempt to sacrifice lives to save pennies.

In fact, cash was not a consideration. The task force's rationale was that the benefits of routine breast cancer screening to women in that age group are insufficient to justify the harms it causes them. Yes, it can be expected to save one life for every 1,904 women aged 40 to 49 who get mammographies, but it also yields false positives, which require additional procedures.

Even when the positives are not false, they often lead to unnecessary treatment—surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy—for tumors that pose little risk. The panel noted that mammograms often serve only to detect "a slower-growing cancer that would have eventually become clinically apparent but would never have caused death."

There are precedents for medical authorities to conclude that tests are not always worthwhile. Last year, the same agency declined to recommend screening for prostate cancer among men under 75 because "the benefits of screening for prostate cancer are uncertain and the balance of benefits and harms cannot be determined." Few protests were heard.

Nor is it usually considered utterly insane to take costs into account. We could save lives by testing everyone over 55 for diabetes, for example. At more than half a million dollars for every healthy year of life that would be saved, however, we have the good sense not to.

But the mammography recommendation goes against the central premise of both American medicine and the welfare state: more is always better. Many American women, who have been told for years that they need to get regular mammograms starting at 40, are not ready to break with that practice, and our political leaders wouldn't dare suggest they reconsider.

Quite the contrary. The Senate voted to force health insurance companies to offer free mammograms—no deductibles, no co-payments. The lawmakers also ordered the federal government to completely disregard the task force proposal.

Republicans as well as Democrats ridiculed the notion that Americans should be denied any test they want at someone else's expense. Said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), "I don't want a government bureaucrat making a decision for the women of America, if they should be allowed to have screening mammograms."

Actually, no one has proposed making it a crime for people to undergo screening. Those patients who think a screening exam is essential, but whose policies don't cover it, may find facilities that offer it free. They would also have the option, however unfamiliar, of paying for it themselves, at an average cost (according to the American Cancer Society) of about $100.

The Senate measure is not about the right to obtain preventive care. It's about the right to make someone else pick up the tab.

By demanding mammogram coverage in private and government plans, the amendment would raise the cost of health insurance for everyone. Which, as you may recall, is exactly the opposite of what "reform" was advertised to do.

Those who think we cannot afford unlimited budgets for health care may take heart from another Senate vote. It repulsed an effort by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), to delete more than $400 billion in promised Medicare savings in the coming decade.

Alas, the Senate, by a 100-0 vote, also promised that no Medicare benefit currently provided will ever be canceled. Even the alleged savings (from—get this—eliminating waste and inefficiency) are unlikely to be achieved. They are in the bill to create the impression that someone, someday, will be willing to control costs.

Fat chance. Many opponents of the administration's effort warn that it will lead to federally imposed rationing of medical care, cruelly denying Americans the treatments they need. The more plausible outcome is that the government will insist on providing anything and everything until the day we run out of money.

Our leaders know they can't do this forever. So they'll settle for doing it as long as they can.

Winning Hearts and Minds

2009-12-07T06:00:00-05:00

A young girl was killed in Afghanistan after she was struck by a box of propaganda leaflets dropped by the British Royal Air Force. The Ministry of Defense called the girl's death "highly regrettable."

Transhuman Wrap: Come for the Little-Kicks Dance, Stay for the Toe Shoes

2009-12-06T21:55:00-05:00

Futurist John Smart is wrapping up the Humanity + Summit by noting that human enhancement believers are too focused on pie-in-the sky visions. Instead of making weird flying-car predictions about the far future, transhumanoids should be pointing to contemporary advances. He may be right, but if anything, this conference was low on mind-blowing visions and outrageous body modifications. And it was entirely devoid of people in borg-style wearables.

The reason for this more plain look for the transhumanists may be strategic. Ken "R.U. Sirius" Goffman pointed out yesterday that metaverse residents are going for more vanilla personal styles generally, and there have been many references to the mainstreaming of out-there human enhancement ideas. There isn't a lot of pressure to rock a science fiction style because we're already in a science fiction age.

The downside of kinder, gentler transhumanism is that it's less conducive to bold new personal looks. To be sure, the Rasputin beard remains ascendent:

Experienced transhumanists will recognize mad monks Aubrey de Gray at left and Todd Huffman at right. By the way, Huffman has at least one magnet implanted in one of his fingertips. Three out of three women I polled found that hot.

Another much needed enhancement that went suspiciously undiscussed at the conference: Leg enhancers that will prevent people from doing the Elaine Banas dance:

Strangely, at this collection of bleeding age pioneers, one of the big attractions at the party was a game that looks like something for people who can't handle Ms. Pac-Man:

In fact the most daring statement at the summit was the Vibram toe shoes, which were very popular:

I don't know enough about transhumanism to say whether the movement is at any kind of crossroads, but I was struck by how modest the claims were at this event -- in addition to all the calls for empathy, which I referred to yesterday. Toe shoes seem useful and ergonomic, but don't these things just beg for a new breed of humans with opposable big toes? If there are transhumanists out there calling for human antennae, wings, pineal gland enhancers and the like, they don't seem to have been in Irvine this weekend.

Ron Bailey Scheduled to Discuss Climategate on Fox & Friends Tomorrow at 7:45 AM

2009-12-06T18:50:00-05:00

Just letting H&R readers know that I'm scheduled to appear on Fox & Friends tomorrow (Monday, December 7) at 7:45 AM to discuss the implications of the Climategate emails. See my column, "The Scientific Tragedy of Climategate" here.

George Will Decries "The Climate Change Travesty"

2009-12-06T18:33:00-05:00

On the eve of the opening of the Copenhagen climate change conference Washington Post columnist George Will is really, really, really annoyed with catastrophic climate change proponents and the Climategate email revelations:

Disclosure of e-mails and documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Britain -- a collaborator with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- reveals some scientists' willingness to suppress or massage data and rig the peer-review process and the publication of scholarly work. The CRU materials also reveal paranoia on the part of scientists who believe that in trying to engineer "consensus" and alarm about warming, they are a brave and embattled minority. Actually, never in peacetime history has the government-media-academic complex been in such sustained propagandistic lockstep about any subject.

The Post learns an odd lesson from the CRU materials: "Climate scientists should not let themselves be goaded by the irresponsibility of the deniers into overstating the certainties of complex science or, worse, censoring discussion of them." These scientists overstated and censored because they were "goaded" by skepticism?

Were their science as unassailable as they insist it is, and were the consensus as broad as they say it is, and were they as brave as they claim to be, they would not be "goaded" into intellectual corruption. Nor would they meretriciously bandy the word "deniers" to disparage skepticism that shocks communicants in the faith-based global warming community.

Savor all of Will's high dudgeon over Climategate here. And go here for an earlier rebuttal of Will's climate change commentary.

Altamont Business Cycle Theory

2009-12-06T07:00:00-05:00

Altamont never would have happened if the feds hadn't bailed out Woodstock.

Singularity Occurs As Unsuspecting Transhumanists Attend Conference At Nearby Office Park

2009-12-05T16:52:00-05:00

The 2009 "Humanity+ Summit" kicked off this morning to a sellout crowd and an overflowing conference room.

Empathy is in the air this year, with tachyons of fellow feeling racing across the conference space -- the graciously provided offices of Eon Reality in sunny Irvine, California -- and embedded nanobots of the milk of human kindness busily recalibrating the hedonic processing centers of seemingly all the transhumanists.

Negative utilitarian philosopher David Pearce, for example, seen at right with Galactus the devourer of worlds, calls for empathy as the building block of a future in which suffering has been abolished.

Yesterday, this correspondent stank up the joint during a Q&A session at the "Biopolitics and Popular Culture Seminar" by asserting that empathy for a robot that gets kicked is wasted empathy, no matter how much pathos the robot's reaction evokes. Annalee Newitz, unflappable imperatrix of the great Io9 blog, put me in my place by pointing out that empathy is not a zero-sum emotion: You can apparently feel sorry for the steel and the hand that wields it. So go ahead and weep for that discarded lamp.

All the empathy talk may seem surprising. This is a crowd that inclines more toward family-outliving extreme life spans; long, lonely cryofreezes; and at best a sort of hive-mind feeling for their fellow meat packages. (In fact, the transhumanists' confidence in a collaboratively filtered fourth wave of collective intellect makes them a refreshing break from libertarians. Several speakers have already called for an end to selfishness, if not self-consiousness, on the path toward a better life under a post-mammalian queen bee. Where do I plug in?) I don't know whether we're talking about a general quality of mercy that droppeth down to the third ventricle of every post-human heart, or if "empathy" is just code for giving equal rights to the scientifically augmented or differently socialized.

For my money, the best show of the day has been University of California, Santa Barbara's Joann Kuchera-Morin's CG-powered presentation "Using the Creative Process to Map N-Dimensions: Quantum Information at your Fingertips," during which stunned audience members were able to see giant carbon atoms and hear the actual sound of electrons. You too may be able to hear the sound of electrons by turning to the "Soundscapes" Music Choice channel, available in the 900s with most cable packages. You can watch live webcast of the conference here.

We can all agree that Ron Bailey defecates better transhumanism coverage than I can ever hope to produce, and I appreciate your patience with my humble efforts. If all goes well, I hope to bring you an extended-lifetime achievement award, Fashion Catastrophes®, and a Miss Congeniality prize later this weekend.

New at Reason: David Harsanyi on Climategate

2009-12-05T07:00:00-05:00

Americans honor the courageous informant, the gutsy citizen who stands against the savagery of the profit-mongering conglomerate, right? Well, sometimes. As David Harsanyi writes, certain politicians have adopted an uncharacteristic silence about Climategate.

We-Don't-Want-To-Talk-About-It-Gate

2009-12-05T07:00:00-05:00

Americans honor the courageous informant, the gutsy citizen who stands against the savagery of the profit-mongering conglomerate. Well, sometimes. It appears, believe it or not, that there are those who aren't religiously tethered to this sacred obligation.

For now—because of revelations of the ClimateGate scandal, in which hacked e-mails revealed discussions among top climate scientists about the manipulation of evidence—Phil Jones, head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in Britain, has stepped down from his position. Michael Mann, architect of the famous "hockey stick" graph, is now under investigation by Pennsylvania State University. Similar inquiries should follow.

Yet Barbara Boxer, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, is off hunting bigger game.

"You call it 'ClimateGate'; I call it 'E-mail-theft-gate,'" Boxer clarified during a committee shindig. "We may well have a hearing on this; we may not. We may have a briefing for senators; we may not." Boxer, as steady as they come, went on to put the focus where it belongs: on hackers. She warned: "Part of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated. ... This is a crime."

If this hacker(s) is unearthed on U.S. soil (or anywhere in the Middle East, actually), Boxer can jettison the guilty party to Gitmo for some well-deserved sleep deprivation.

But surely there is time for some sort of investigation? This is, after all, the senator who ran a vital committee hearing in 2008 so that an Environmental Protection Agency whistle-blower, who accused the Bush administration of failing to address greenhouse gas emissions appropriately, could have his say.

Boxer's rigid devotion to rule of law is also admirable. But this is the senator who championed the Military Whistleblower Protection Act and fought for whistle-blowing rights for defense contractor employees (to ferret out bureaucratic waste) and for nurses (to protect patients' rights).

All of which sound like sensible protections for the truth-seeking citizen. Because taxpayers matter.

So take Kevin Trenberth, who was caught claiming it was a "travesty" that climate scientists could not "account for the lack of warming at the moment"—though such anxiety never slowed him from weaving unnerving tales of calamity. Trenberth runs the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., which obtains 95 percent of its funding from taxpayers.

Take the taxpayer-funded EPA, which was handed the incredible power to arbitrarily (and without Congress) regulate all carbon dioxide, through the Clean Air Act, in part because of the science in question.

Take NASA, which—despite a 2-year-old Freedom of Information Act request asking for research detailing its historical data—continues to ignore taxpayers.

Are these state secrets?

Surely this insularity is one reason 59 percent of Americans, according to a new Rasmussen poll, believe it is "somewhat likely" that some scientists falsified research data to support their own global warming theories. (Thirty-five percent of Americans believe it's "very likely.")

Fortunately, President Barack Obama has an unwavering admiration of truth tellers, asserting during his campaign that their "acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled."

Well, we don't need acts of courage and patriotism. Not yet. Just start with a committee hearing, and work your way up. Because the real crime here would be to continue to irresponsibly pass more experimental legislation that fundamentally undermines our affluent economy and free society on the word of those whom we might not be able to trust.

David Harsanyi is a columnist at The Denver Post and the author of Nanny State. Visit his Web site at www.DavidHarsanyi.com.

The Value of Ayn Rand to the Freedom Movement

2009-12-04T18:49:00-05:00

Katherine Mangu-Ward writes below of today's Wall Street Journal article questioning the value of Rand to the free-market movement. The piece quotes and cites me and my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.

When the reporter, Heather Wilhelm, interviewed me for the piece, I had a great deal to say about her thesis, most of which I couldn't really reproduce any longer, but here are some scattered thoughts.

I say, not entirely humbly, that to understand the full story of exactly how important Ayn Rand was and is to the libertarian movement as it exists today, you really should read the 40,000 or so words on the topic contained in my book, noted above, which makes an amazingly appropriate Christmas present:

*A difficult and often obscure ideology's adherents should think a few times at least before condemning or denying an immensely popular novelist who is collecting hundreds of thousands of new readers 52 years after the publication of her last novel.

*Obviously, many libertarians don't agree with everything Rand said (neither do I), or find her tone always congenial, or find aspects of her personality or her fans salubrious. This is all somewhat interesting as a matter of intellectual history. Why it is something that lots of libertarians feel a need to speak out about so frequently, and on many occasions so saltily, sometimes confuses me (I know, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal called and asked; that's decent reason enough I suppose.) And one's personal distaste or disagreement with Rand absolutely pales in importance, if the spread of libertarian thinking is your concern, with Rand's value.

It is one thing to say, as the complaints of many libertarian anti-Randians amount to, that her particular style or arguments wouldn't be convincing to my mind at this point in my intellectual development (or that I imagine a world of others to which it wouldn't either); another thing to say that she doesn't turn lots of people to libertarian thinking.

*Despite what Fr. Sirico is quoted as saying by Wilhelm, clearly Rand both offends and converts. It is my belief that she offends for the most part only the ones who could not be converted--that is, people whose core moral and intellectual values would make them enemies of economic liberty whether or not they ever came across the scabrous invective of Ayn Rand or were ever forced to wonder how much Ellsworth Toohey they might have in them. In which case, her offending them is no net loss for the cause of libertarian conversion.

*Rand's very colorful aspects that make magazines like GQ dedicate thousands of words (why, a veritable "cacophony of rage and dread," as Wilhelm quotes the New Republic saying of Rand's fans) even today to pissing on her grave guarantee that at least some of those readers, intrigued by how a dead and supposedly terrible novelist could so captivate and infuriate journalists and editors today, how she could elicit such interesting thoughts from such interesting characters as Michael Malice or Nick Gillespie, will read her. Some will be offended, and some will be converted. (Most will just be either entertained or bored.)

*Brink Lindsey is right noting in Wilhelm's article that it's a good thing to have people out there in the intellectual fight stressing what he calls his "bleeding heart libertarianism." In all my admiration for Rand I would never recommend that everyone in the world of libertarian persuasion ought to emulate her. The libertarian movement's richness and success are not due to any one thinker's rhetoric, ideas, or approach. Clearly different styles and emphases are needed for a full-service intellectual movement devoted to social and political change.

Having said that...I will now say this: That Ayn Rand was who she was, and did what she did, was a good thing for the spread of libertarian ideas; that's a very hard thing to deny, however little you admire her yourself. (I recall, though I was unable to verify it for sure this afternoon, that Brink Lindsey's own intellectual career had an early phase writing for Objectivist publications. I'll correct this point if I'm mistaken in my memory.)

Katherine Mangu-Ward closed with a quote from Rand's former right-hand man Nathaniel Branden, about the interesting (but not, I think, terribly relevant to the long-dead novelist's appeal today and in the future) benefits of distance from Rand the human.

I have a favorite Nathaniel Branden quote I like to drag out everytime I'm in the middle of the Ayn Rand war zone, which can be found on page 542 of my book. Branden was noting that Rand's detractors rarely deign "publicly to name the essential ideas of Atlas Shrugged and to attempt to refute them. No one has been willing to declare: 'Ayn Rand holds that man must choose his values and actions exclusively by reason, that man has the right to exist for his own sake, that no one has the right to seek values from others by physical force--and I consider such ideas wrong, evil and socially dangerous."

A Garden Noam For Your Killing Fields

2009-12-04T17:59:00-05:00

The Nation magazine sends its loyal readers a fundraising appeal, beseeching them to bid on commie gewgaws like the Noam Chomsky garden gnome (current bud $340) and a Karl Marx plush toy (current bid $35).

Are you tired of all those cute but essentially brainless "beanie" dolls? We were, so to offset the trend we designed the "Little Thinkers." Let the Little Thinkers add a little culture and humor to your life. 11" Tall and oh, so smart!

But for $35, one can still snag a panoramic photograph of the destroyed city of Hiroshima, though be warned that the Col. Paul Tibbets bobblehead and Bataan death march skateboard both appear to be sold out.

Way back in 2002, Nick Gillespie noted this clever little item for sale on the website of Mother Jones magazine:

Although I've been dead for close to 80 years, I've got a great new gig these days, shilling bowling shirts for my comrades at Mother Jones. I know what you're thinking: It's ironic for me to be hawking merchandise for a left-wing magazine that spends much of its time attacking capitalism for creating false needs. In fact, the May-June issue even slags the makers of so-called alcopops--"sweet malt-based beverages" such as Mike's Hard Lemonade and Smirnoff Ice--for pitching their product to kids in an attempt to "groom the next generation of drinkers."

But hey--they don't call it a commodity fetish for nothing, and the shirts only cost $39.95. That's pocket change you can probably expropriate from the kulak next door. And what other murderous head of state are you going to wear on your back to show how cool your are? Hitler, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot--none of those guys is half as hip as moi.

My only fear is that my current employer is going to catch wind of my dubious past as a proponent of the death penalty, especially since they are rightly skeptical of that policy's efficacy. In 1922, as I was starting to pick off my former beloved revolutionary pals, I wrote to the people's commissar of justice, "It is my view that the leeway for applying the death penalty should be considerably enlarged, and should include all the activities of Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and others." Oh well, it's not like I let soda pop be sold in Soviet schools.

All-Beef Paddies: Why America Loves Simian Irish Caricatures

2009-12-04T17:59:00-05:00

Jeet Heer, the Dian Fossey of ethnic identity studies, explores how the classic ape-like Irish caricature became the face of American everyman Homer Simpson. According to Heer, the missing link in the evolution of what my grandmother used to dismiss as "shanty Irish" came in the form of Jiggs, the great rich-slob character in George McManus' long-running comic strip Bringing Up Father:

The Simian Irishman of the 19th century was simply a figure of contempt and fear. McManus, who was himself part-Irish, redeployed this stereotype but in a slightly more positive way. McManus’ strip deals with the adventures of Maggie and Jiggs, two Irish-Americans born into working class poverty. Jiggs is functionally illiterate and spent most of his life working in manual jobs, digging ditches and doing basic construction. The couple has a beautiful daughter named Nora, who is of marrying age. For some unexplained reason, Maggie and Jiggs become enormously wealthy. Newly rich Maggie is transformed into a diligent social climber, eager to join high society and find an aristocratic husband for her nubile daughter.

Maggie’s attempts to enter into the realm of high society are constantly foiled by her husband, who retains an atavistic love for working class Irish culture. Time and again, Jiggs embarrasses Maggie and Nora but his uncouth behaviour, which includes smoking a clay-pipe (a tell tale sign of Irish origins), cavorting around in his undershirt and suspenders, and bringing home his uncouth friends from the old neighbourhood. Jiggs clearly prefers the company of his drinking buddies and card-playing cronies to that the counts, dukes, and society ladies that his wife and daughter are constantly trying to corral into their home. Splendidly incorrigible, Jiggs is always trying to sneak off a saloon or a ball-game so he doesn’t have to go to the opera. Despite being married for two decades he also has an eye for the ladies, and forgoes a chance at seeing a serious play performed by Sarah Bernhardt for an afternoon at a burlesque show. While visiting Paris, Jiggs characteristically prefers collecting naughty French post-cards to viewing the masterpieces of the Louvre. (A quick consumers note: McManus’s elegant deco art makes the Bringing Up Father book worth acquiring, although it has to be said that the repetitious gags and one-dimensional nature of the characters makes this a lesser work than such early masterpieces as Krazy Kat or Popeye.)

This is a brief piece, and Heer doesn't get into many of the permutations that are presumably covered in L. Perry Curtis’ book Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, which I want for Christmas. We're all enlightened people here, so it's understood that when we talk about these stereotypes we're treating them as fictional relics, but just look at the face of Barry Fitzgerald here. Does a jaw like that really belong on an American?

One example of how extensive and respectable the cultural penetration of the Irish ape persona once was: T.S. Eliot opens his famous and still-anthologized poem "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" with the phrase "Apeneck Sweeney." Reason's Nick Gillespie tells a story on himself in which he asks his English teacher "What does appenneck mean" -- which pretty much proves Eliot's point about how retarded our gene pool really is.